"Entre Leila Khaled e Winnie Mandela"

Tradução de Déborah Cardoso Ribas

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We were there.

We have always been there.

We were there when the man on a horse took out a gun and took our daughter Bontekanye from her mother to his wife.

He and his wife renamed their ‘new’ daughter Karien.

They believed themselves good volk heeding their government’s call. They were going to civilise her.

Teach her to read, write and some arithmetic.

Teach her the Bible and the importance of turning the other cheek. So that she could be a clever black.

An oorlamse kaffir.

Always on their side and defending their interests.

You will ask, why did you allow the man with a gun to take her? We will tell you, we knew what was to come.

Foresight.

We knew that she would birth Paulina.

And Paulina would raise Neo. The gift. Our gift.

Importantly too, we didn’t know how to stop bullets. It was guns that killed us.

It was a gun too, that would later kill our child Neo many years later in a land far away from home.

So we blamed the guns and we blamed the gun owners’ greed.

But.

From the beginning.

We were there.

We have always been there.

Agnostics are undecided about our existence. Atheists call us The Deceased.

The truth is, our bodies may be buried, rotten even, but we never died. We are watching.

We try to protect.

And we will seek revenge when one of ours is taken. The reckoning may take a while but it arrives.

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Gaza 2023.

Neo, our son Neo, had again gone as a volunteer to Gaza for a charity operating in South Africa and in Gaza. He had visited prior and had been horrified at what he experienced. And so getting in through the Egyptian-manned Rafah Border and spending a month every year volunteering to teach journalism became his annual pilgrimage. He constantly reminded his young students the importance of witnessing as told by Baldwin. He believed the testimonies would come in handy to hold those who committed atrocities accountable in the future. In a future people-centred, just world.

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Gaza 2023.

He had been gone a week when news of an attack on an ethnostate responsible for the problems that Neo tried to assist in documenting, happened. We had always known that his life would end there but we had not quite realized how it would. When those he had left at home suggested that he return, he chose to stay. Convinced that the aggression from the ethnostate would last only a short while.

This was not the first time he had seen their behaviour. But he believed himself protected. And truth is, we protect but our powers wane with the distance from base. And Neo was over 6 thousand kilometres from home.

And just like the kidnapping of one of his foremothers, Bontekanye, she they would later call Karien, Neo died at the hands of a man who believed himself superior to any Gazan by virtue of dubious citizenship of the ethnostate. A palm-coloured man. And in a strange twist of fate, one of the descendants of the man who kidnapped Bontekanye, she that they would later call Karien.

This young man, Jan by name, had moved with his father, having converted to Judaism because, young as he was, born after 1994, he believed that South Africa was going to the dogs. His parents who he moved with had told him of the ‘good old days.’ The days when those who formed majority in government looked ‘like us.’ Now a lieutenant for the ethnostate Ground Forces, he had no qualms looking at our son in the eye at Al Shifa Hospital.

It was the pin with the South African flag Neo wore on his journalistic vest that gave him away. ‘A kaffir. You are aiding and abetting terrorists? My father fought against you lot in Angola, Namibia and at home and I will fight against you too. Bloody terrorists.’

It was then that Neo knew he was dying and with a resigned look, he watched this man, Jan, as he raised his gun, looked at him straight in the eye and shot him point blank.

We saw it happen. Our powers were less with our distance from home but we knew, this Jan with a family with apartheid nostalgia, so much apartheid nostalgia they partially left South Africa because their power to oppress was lesser now and they could oppress better in the ethnostate, we knew this Jan would, as always, make several trips back to South Africa to check on some of his investments.

This morning, we got our revenge.

He had been jogging and paused for the light to change at the corner of Winnie Mandela Drive and Leila Khaled Drive. A fitting place to finish him.

We wore a thobe, in remembrance of the work of the women of Gaza who fed our son even when they had little to nothing to give. And we wore our son’s face, so he would be reminded why this was happening.

He blinked twice, wondering whether he was seeing things. ‘Who are you? What are you?’ he screeched.

Other people looked at him wondering who he was talking to. But Joburgers are who they are and they pretended not to see him and continued minding their business.

With our son’s face, we smiled malevolently. With hands only he could see, we pulled the sleeves of our thobe over our hands.

‘I said get away from me,’ he ineffectually tried to hit at we who are spirit. We who can only be seen by those who have a reckoning.

It was our smile on our son’s face that he last saw as the sleeves of the thobe slowly suffocated him.

They’ll probably say it was a heart attack.

But we know he saw Death with the face of our son and wearing a thobe at the corner of Leila Khaled Drive and Winnie Mandela Drive.

We avenged our son’s death there by the US Consulate in Sandton, Johannesburg.

Fitting really. Taking the life that took our son’s life at the place that represents the country arming his ethnostate. The country that probably gave him the bullets that took our Neo.

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In memory of Ahmed Abbasi and all Gazans who have been killed in the genocide.

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